Alarming news from this week's New Scientist about melting of permafrost in Siberia due to warming. 70 billion tonnes of methane could be released, equivalent in greenhouse warming effect to 1.4 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than 200 times the world's annual carbon dioxide emissions.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500

Climate warning as Siberia melts

11 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Fred Pearce

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.

Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.

The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite end of the same process, known as thermokarsk.

In this process, rising air temperatures first create "frost-heave", which turns the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.
“This is an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”

Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.

His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.

An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.
From issue 2512 of New Scientist magazine, 11 August 2005, page 12

haku

13-08-2005, 20:36

Thanks for the informative article, we're living interesting times, it seems that Siberia will become an immense fertile region in a few decades, as fertile as the American mid west has been until now. That plus the fact that the withdrawal of the north pole ice ring will allow the opening of a new commercial route for boats between Europe and South-East Asia instead of going through the dangerous Gulf region, no wonder that Russia is considering the global warming as not really a bad thing for them.

simon

13-08-2005, 22:26

But the effects for most of the world will be devastating!

The most pessimistic predictions were that the permafrost might be melting away like this by the middle of the century. If it's happening now, it suggests that the carbon sinks are much more sensitive to warming than was thought and global warming will be much worse. Forget about the IPCC's 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C warming this century - think 6 to 12 degrees. Those kind of rises would turn most of the world to desert and make most life on Earth extinct.

Uhaku

14-08-2005, 07:41

It is a sad news when the animals are going to be extinct. I don't think there is a pessimistic prediction. It's the most true. Sad news, indeed. Is there a way to help? :bum:

Shakrin

14-08-2005, 10:05

ways to help? i think it's kinda too late for that. there are some hard headed people who dont give a flying frog on the warmings or the meltings; and to help we have to start convincing them to work with the environmentalists, scientists, and people who are willing to help. and even then if we do convince all of them... i think it's gonna be too late.

QueenBee

14-08-2005, 15:20

I thought it said climax warning at first... my mind is corrupted. :(

haku

14-08-2005, 15:52

i think it's kinda too late
Yeah, i also think so, it's too late to do anything, the various threshholds have most probably been crossed many decades ago. The permafrost in Siberia, Canada and Alaska has been melting for several years now, the ice coat in Greenland and Antarctica is melting as well, and the ice of the North Pole is getting thinner and thinner, nothing can stop or even slow down such a massive phenomenon.

The planet is about to live a change of era, like what happened 65 million years ago when the planet went from the Mesozoic era to the Cenozoic era, and of course there is going to be a massive extinction like what happened at the end of the Mesozoic era with the Cretaceous extinction.

Uhaku

14-08-2005, 18:31

I still think there is a way to prevent it from total destruction, or maybe just slow it down. The governments need to work together to make it work. But the big people just don't give a damn, and the smaller people are just hopeless. Cheers.

simon

14-08-2005, 18:33

If the peat bog dries out before the methane is released, it will be broken down to carbon dioxide, which is 20 times less warming than methane. It will add to global warming, but if the world realises just how dangerous the situation is and decided to phase out using fossil fuels over the next few decades and switch to renewables and nuclear (I know, but this is an emergency) for electricity and hydrogen for fuel (this week it was announced that somebody has finally found an efficient way to generate hydrogen from solar energy) then it might be possible to avert the worst. But I don't think even Europe, let alone America and China, is prepared to take such radical action. It would interfere with the economy, and that's more important to most voters and governments than the fate of the world decades from now.

Thanks for the info, Simon. We all know it is not entirely hopeless yet, but if it goes to the worst, I think human species should be the one to be extinct. :rolleyes:

Shakrin

15-08-2005, 08:21

but if it goes to the worst, I think human species should be the one to be extinct.

hear hear!!
:)

Amy_Lee_Rocks

25-02-2006, 21:49

Alaska is also melting, Polar Bears might become extinct

Please do not post entirely in bold letters, thanks.

haku

05-11-2006, 23:15

The WMO has just released a report (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6114250.stm) showing that carbon dioxide levels continue to rise steadily with no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future.

Another recent Nasa study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6069506.stm) shows that Greenland is currently losing about 100 billion tonnes of ice every year.
The Greenland ice sheet was still stable in the 1990s, so obviously a threshhold has been crossed in the last 10 years and now ice is melting fast everywhere on the planet.

I've recently seen a documentary on Greenland and the climate warming is obvious over there, the southern part of the island is currently being colonized by plants and animals never seen on the island before, and people are now able to grow patatoes for example, it used to be impossible as the frozen soil would kill them.

forre

05-11-2006, 23:48

We'll kill each other because of the political friction in the world sooner than any climate catastrophe occurs. If statistics existed 600 years ago I'd love to see how it all changed. Climate scientists don't even know themselves how ice melting will affect global environmental changes. Dinosaurs disappeared long time ago and I guess not because of some carbon dioxide levels. LOL. Before getting into a big panic, I think we should collect more knowledge.

haku

06-11-2006, 00:43

If statistics existed 600 years ago I'd love to see how it all changed.Well, we do know how it was 600 years ago, we have data going back 650,000 years actually, from the analysis of air trapped in the Antartic ice sheet.

Here's a graph (http://www.mongabay.com/images/external/2005/co2_var.jpg) showing carbon dioxide levels for the past 400,000 years.
This figure shows the variations in concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere during the last 400 thousand years. Throughout most of the record, the largest changes can be related to glacial/interglacial cycles within the current ice age. Although the glacial cycles are most directly caused by changes in the Earth's orbit (i.e. Milankovitch cycles), these changes also influence the carbon cycle, which in turn feeds back into the glacial system.

Since the Industrial Revolution, circa 1800, the burning of fossil fuels has caused a dramatic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, reaching levels unprecedented in the last 400 thousand years. This increase has been implicated as a primary cause of global warming.
This graph shows that there used to be a carbon cycle in sync with the glacial/interglacial cycles, carbon was high during warm periods, carbon was low during glacial periods, it was like clockwork.
We can see that the highest levels were regularly around 280ppm and the lowest levels around 180ppm. Before the industrial revolution, carbon levels were normally high for a warm period just following a glacial one (which ended 10,000 years ago), around 280ppm, but for the last 200 years, carbon levels have skyrocketed to 380ppm and continue to rise by 20ppm every 10 years.
We'll be close to 500ppm in 2050, almost twice higher than what used to be the highest levels for the last 650,000 years, which means our atmosphere will be as far from a normal warm period as a normal warm period was from a glacial age, that's a massive difference.
Such a steep unprecedented increase can only lead to a major climate change.

rowe

06-11-2006, 01:54

If any of you guys and girls have seen "An Inconvenient Truth", which if not i suggest you do, it shows how Greenland is melting and in fact has a huge torrent running through it virtually down to the crust! If this occurs it will mean an increase in cold freshwater. An increase in cold freshwater means that the cold water does not sink to the floor bed (because the salt is heavier and usually brings it down) and thus halting the great ocean conveyer belt, which literally controls our climate. It will mean the evaporation of freezing cold water from the top of the sea (which was Greenlands ice) and an increase in this very cold precipitation. Basically Europe will be in an ice age. In reply to forre, it is not the need for a "big panic" but rather "big action." We need an immediate change of circumstances. We are the people, we have rights and just like the russian revolution proved the wealthy complacent and selfish do not win in the end. Al Gore needs to be voted in, hybridised or electric/oxygen fuel must be used and we must take responsibility for our environment...personally..

forre

06-11-2006, 18:03

We'll be close to 500ppm in 2050, almost twice higher than what used to be the highest levels for the last 650,000 years, which means our atmosphere will be as far from a normal warm period as a normal warm period was from a glacial age, that's a massive difference.
Such a steep unprecedented increase can only lead to a major climate change.
With another words, we should have been facing Ice Age 10 years ago. Where are we now? How would you stop environmental changes? Scientists are split as a matter of fact. There's a group that think that the greenhouse effect protects the planet from solar activities and another group thinks that it destroys the balance on the planet. What am I trying to say is that studies don't seem to be complete to me, thus I personally can't do anything. Then, no one lives for ever.

freddie

06-11-2006, 18:53

Greenhouse effect does protect the Earth from Sun's radiation, but only when the effect is moderate. It's starting to appear as though human emissions are contributing in graudual over-development in what is otherwise a normal atmospheric phenomenon. I think there's still time though.

Argos

06-11-2006, 22:33

Help, we die from overheating in a poisonous CO2-atmosphere!

Well, scientists can play with numbers and simply tell us anything. But if we look at those numbers which they don't show us so much, we get a quite different picture. The CO2-contents of the atmosphere was NEVER so low in earth history than in the last few million years (read beginning of glacial cycles), the surface temperature of the earth was most of the time considerably above the values of today. For a low resolution graph of temperature and CO2 for the last 550 mio years look here (http://www.angewandte-geologie.geol.uni-erlangen.de/klimaf3.jpg) - sorry text in german, but I think, you can figure it out, anyway. I want to compare the hystery with a man who has almost been drowned, now the water goes up to the throat, and he has fear that he may die of thirst.

Another interesting graph, rarely shown is this (http://www.angewandte-geologie.geol.uni-erlangen.de/klimaf2.jpg), again in german - the correlation between the length of the solar (sunspot) cycle and the global temperature. I always knew that some magicians can influence the irradiation of the sun!

What else should we know, before "we die because of our own fault to destroy our environment"? Volcanic activity produces about 34 +/- 22 Megatons CO2 through active surface eruptions and about 31 +/- 22 Megatons of passive outgassing per year, both very strongly fluctuating, whereas mankind produces about 7 Megatons, of which 4 Megatons are buried by algae and plants. Despite those facts the rise of CO2 goes on in a very constant way of 1.5 ppm per year.

haku

06-11-2006, 22:49

How would you stop environmental changes? Scientists are split as a matter of fact. There's a group that think that the greenhouse effect protects the planet from solar activities and another group thinks that it destroys the balance on the planet. What am I trying to say is that studies don't seem to be complete to me, thus I personally can't do anything. Then, no one lives for ever.Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying this is the end of the world and we're all going to die, i'm not a doomsday preacher.

The planet has known very warm periods in the past, not during human times but millions of years ago when reptiles dominated the planet, so life as a whole will go on. As for humans, we managed to survive during the last glacial age, when it was so cold that there were glaciers in southern France and oceans were so low that it was possible to cross the Channel on foot, so i'm guessing we can survive to an oppositely extreme climate.

I definitely not think that we need to panic, mainly because there's nothing we can do. Personally i think it's too late to do anything, the climate change is already engaged, threshholds have been crossed… Greenland, Arctic, Antartic, Siberia, Canada, the ice and permafrost are melting fast everywhere, and it's not by reducing our emissions by 10% or whatever that we're going to stop such a massive phenomenon.
Plus the biggest polluters on the planet (US, China, India) refuse to do anything about it, so what's being done by a few other countries is meaningless.

That being said, i think it's important to prepare for the change instead of just wait for it (or even try to stop it which seems impossible).
Oceans are going to rise, 5 to 10m probably, maybe more, we can prepare for that, we can progressively move populations out of low areas.
A good part of Africa is going to become uninhabitable, again we need to move populations.
Many vegetal and animal species will die out, including species that we use for food, we need to adapt and select species that will resist to a much warmer climate.
And while Africa will die for the most part, Canada and Siberia will become much warmer and inhabitable, very large and almost empty lands where hundreds of millions of people will be able to live.
The key is to prepare instead of just wait for it to happen.

Argos

06-11-2006, 23:25

Many vegetal and animal species will die out, including species that we use for food, we need to adapt and select species that will resist to a much warmer climate.
And while Africa will die for the most part, Canada and Siberia will become much warmer and inhabitable, very large and almost empty lands where hundreds of millions of people will be able to live.
The key is to prepare instead of just wait for it to happen.
Well, almost any plants and animals have a very high ability of adaption for warmer climate, whereas there is much lower tolerance for colder regions. So most species will not have problems. In general warmer climate means more evaporation of water, thus higher humidity, less deserts, more CO2, now bound in the ocean waters,which helps plants for assimilation. In fact many plants suffer because of the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and many plants had to find new ways of assimilation to avoid extinction (C4-cycle, CAM-cycle).

If we sum up all the positive and negative effects, there is a clear trend to more favourable conditions of a warmer earth. A good preparation for the future is nevertheless a good idea to benefit from the advantages and avoid harmful consequences.

haku

11-11-2006, 20:55

Carbon emissions rising faster than ever

Far from slowing down, global carbon dioxide emissions are rising faster than before, said a gathering of scientists in Beijing on Friday.

Between 2000 and 2005, emissions grew four times faster than in the preceding 10 years, according to researchers at the Global Carbon Project, a consortium of international researchers. Global growth rates were 0.8% from 1990 to 1999. From 2000 to 2005, they reached 3.2%.

Though alarming, the figures confirm expectations. "They make intuitive sense to me," says Jim Watson, deputy leader of the energy programme at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, UK.

One likely contributor is China, whose emissions slowed at end of the 1990s before rising again. China is now the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US. On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency released a report predicting that it would become the world’s top emitter by 2030.

Other growing developing countries, such as India and Brazil, are also fast becoming large emitters.

The US, meanwhile, is taking no nationwide action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme - created to help EU nations abide by their agreed Kyoto Protocol emissions limits - failed to do so in 2005, its first year of operation. It is unlikely to do so until its second phase of operation, which begins in 2008.

Unacceptably high

The Global Carbon Project report shows that carbon dioxide emissions over the last five years resembled one of the scenarios which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to predict how the world will change with greenhouse gas emissions. The “A1B” scenario assumes that 50% of energy over the next century will come from fossil fuels, resulting in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations causing drastic climatic consequences.

"On our current path, we will find it extremely difficult to rein in carbon emissions enough to stabilise the atmospheric CO2 concentration at 450 parts per million and even 550 ppm will be a challenge," says Josep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project.

Research suggests that stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations at 450 ppm could limit global warming to 2°C.

Environmental inertia

The authors also highlight the importance of environmental inertia. This is the mechanism by which the environment stores up part of the energy of generated by greenhouse gas emissions, only releasing it to the atmosphere later on.

As a result, even when human emissions do begin to drop, atmospheric carbon dioxide will continue to rise for up to a century. Global temperatures will continue to increase for two or more centuries.

"This report shows how important it is for all countries to work towards more ambitious climate targets within the next phase of international action beyond 2012," says Watson.

He adds: "Action to persuade the US and large developing countries such as China and India to work towards such an agreement is particularly crucial. So is the acceleration of technological co-operation initiatives to help developing countries - particularly China - to move to a lower carbon development pathway."

New Scientist (http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn10507)
10 November 2006

rowe

16-11-2006, 23:32

Actually Forre that is a misconception all of the scientists around the world (or at least the well recognised) are collaborating and agreeing that greenhouse gasses are too high and potentially disastrous. There is no doubt. Sure in moderation greenhouse gasses keep us warm but it is off balance.

Argos

17-11-2006, 19:24

Actually Forre that is a misconception all of the scientists around the world (or at least the well recognised) are collaborating and agreeing that greenhouse gasses are too high and potentially disastrous. There is no doubt. Sure in moderation greenhouse gasses keep us warm but it is off balance.
That's one of the most stupid things scientists tell nowadays. I tell it again: There was never a time in earth history where there was such a low CO2 content than in the past 5 Mio. years. All scientists know that most climatic changes, even small ones, are quite fast. There is nothing to worry, only the necessity to adapt.

The amount of naturally produced CO2 is on average at least four times higher than human produced. The fluctuations of this production is extremely high (from about equal to human up to more than 20 times), nevertheless there is almost no fluctuation in graphs showing CO2 contents in the atmosphere.

This leads to a simple conclusion: Practically all produced CO2 is consumed by plants. This is done at least for the last 350 Mio. years, when plants spread over the whole earth and forrests became abundant.The remaining small value depends only on the temperature and the composition of earth's vegetation. For most plants the low CO2 amount of today is a serious threat to survive. Only plants with C4 or CAM metabolism don't have problems with that low content.

The scientists know all the facts, but they have to fight for money for research. Only those disciplines get enough which can prove great 'human relevance', Biology, Chemistry, Medicine. What to do? Create shock-scenarios: Kuno, the killer-carp is hunting you and bambi swallows up innocent walkers. That's nothing new, you have only to get accustomed to it.

haku

30-01-2007, 21:50

Melting of mountain glaciers is accelerating

Mountain glaciers are retreating three times faster than they were in the 1980s, says the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

On average, they lost about 66 centimetres in depth in 2005, according to the latest report from the UN-affiliated body, released on 30 January. This loss rate is 1.6 times more than the annual average for the 1990s and three times the 1980s average.

While the rate of change is certainly alarming, it is not a surprise, says Michael Zemp of WGMS. He says it fits in with the accelerating trend of the past 25 years, and simply serves to "make it sharper".

The truly worrying observation, he says, comes when the past 150 years are analysed in the context of the past 10,000 years of glacial history. Mountain glaciers reached their maximum extent for 10,000 years in 1850. But since then they have lost 50% of their area and retreated to their minimum extent for 10,000 years.

Biggest and highest

Global temperatures during that time rose by about 0.8°C. But a major report from the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is expected to announce on Friday that global temperatures will rise by a further 2.0°C to 4.5°C by 2100.

The WGMS believes that an increase of 3°C on current European temperatures would mean the European Alps would lose another 80% of their glaciers. If temperature predictions are accurate "only biggest and highest glaciers would survive into 21st century", says Zemp.

WGMS monitors 30 representative glaciers from nine mountain ranges around the world. They measure the thinning in metres of water equivalent, to account for differences in ice density (1.0 m of water equivalent is about 1.1 m of ice). On average, mountain glaciers have lost 9.6 metres of water equivalent since 1980.

The data indicate that glaciers in the European Alps are among those shrinking fastest. Since 2000, they have been losing an average of 1 metre every year and have lost 19 metres since 1980. They are now only about 30 metres deep on average.

Consensus and timing

The imminent release of the IPCC report has prompted speculation on how conservative the report will be, particularly in its predictions of sea-level rises. Media leaks suggest the report will predict rises of between 28 cm and 43 cm by 2100. The upper limit is considerably less than the IPCC's 2001 prediction of up to 88cm, but some recent studies suggest the upper limit should in fact be higher.

The issue is partly one of consensus. The 3750 report authors and reviewers and 154 participating governments need to agree on everything in the report. Inevitably, the most extreme predictions will be hardest to get agreement on.

There is also the question of timing. Studies published after mid-2006 may have come too late to be included in the IPCC report.

A study led by Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, is a case in point: published in Science in December 2006, it predicts rises of up to 140 cm.

But Zemp believes that, so far as mountain glaciers are concerned, the IPCC report will take all the latest data into account. He personally submitted a study in summer 2006 and believes it has formed part of the IPCC's deliberations, Furthermore, his colleagues have been working on the IPCC report, and have access to frequently updated WGMS data.

New Scientist (http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11064)

haku

04-04-2007, 03:10

Farewell to a melting glacier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6496429.stm)

QueenBee

29-05-2007, 21:30

I care, haku! But I don't have all the facts, and definitely not the necessary knowledge of English... so unfortunately I cannot join this debate. Thanks for the links. Also, I am freaking out about all these climate changes. I don't know who to believe.

But I will comment on what someone said earlier, about "An Inconvenient Truth", that was a really good movie. He should have been president instead. *sighs*

I was in a bad mood, don't pay attention, but thanks. :kwink:

freddie

30-05-2007, 14:14

One interesting thing about that projection is the vast melting progress from 1982 to 2001, which indicates the amoung of polution emited into the athmosphere in the late 80s & 90s. The 80s were the the 4th consecutive decade firmly established in industrial revolution - pretty much all aspects of modern life as we know today were present then as well... and yet the critical mass hasn't been reached and the planet could still maintain it's ballance. So It would appear modern way of life is not the root cause of all our woes, but rather the EXCESS
of it. Something brought by the 21st century.

One thing's for sure though: the corporate quest for profit will never back down to environmental concerns. Such is the nature of people. And in light of that... the Kyoto protocol was too ambitious.

Станко394

01-06-2007, 00:47

It is a sad news when the animals are going to be extinct. I don't think there is a pessimistic prediction. It's the most true. Sad news, indeed. Is there a way to help? :bum:

Good question.
First of all, America should join those countries who are worried for climate, and all countries around world should start some programs for saving planet [any kind]

And if you ask what could WE do, I dunno. :laugh:
Just try to keep nature clean..hahaha..XD

Amy_Lee_Rocks

01-06-2007, 00:51

Good question.
First of all, America should join those countries who are worried for climate, and all countries around world should start some programs for saving planet [any kind]

And if you ask what could WE do, I dunno. :laugh:
Just try to keep nature clean..hahaha..XD

Yeah, i agree.
I care most about the animals...
look at the cute dolphins! awwwww

QueenBee

01-06-2007, 00:58

Even simple things like being careful about what groceries you buy can help. Things that are imported from countries far away obviously use more energy (if you know what I mean) because of the transportation, so it's a wise decision to buy things that are either from your own country, or somewhere not too far.

Or to sort your trash, like not mixing paper with plastic, that way it can be re-used and won't require as much energy (to make new material).

simon

03-06-2007, 01:41

I hadn't seen this before, but I must comment on it.

Well, scientists can play with numbers and simply tell us anything. But if we look at those numbers which they don't show us so much, we get a quite different picture. The CO2-contents of the atmosphere was NEVER so low in earth history than in the last few million years (read beginning of glacial cycles), the surface temperature of the earth was most of the time considerably above the values of today. For a low resolution graph of temperature and CO2 for the last 550 mio years look here (http://www.angewandte-geologie.geol.uni-erlangen.de/klimaf3.jpg) - sorry text in german, but I think, you can figure it out, anyway. I want to compare the hystery with a man who has almost been drowned, now the water goes up to the throat, and he has fear that he may die of thirst.

The important thing isn't that the CO2 level is getting higher, but that it's rising very rapidly and is beginning to cause rapid temperature rises.

Another interesting graph, rarely shown is this (http://www.angewandte-geologie.geol.uni-erlangen.de/klimaf2.jpg), again in german - the correlation between the length of the solar (sunspot) cycle and the global temperature. I always knew that some magicians can influence the irradiation of the sun!

Got to love the global warming deniers graphs! Notice that the graph ends just after 1980. Why is that? Because the relationship between length of solar cycle and temperature broke down then.

What else should we know, before "we die because of our own fault to destroy our environment"? Volcanic activity produces about 34 +/- 22 Megatons CO2 through active surface eruptions and about 31 +/- 22 Megatons of passive outgassing per year, both very strongly fluctuating, whereas mankind produces about 7 Megatons, of which 4 Megatons are buried by algae and plants. Despite those facts the rise of CO2 goes on in a very constant way of 1.5 ppm per year.

Argos' figures for emissions from volcanic activity are about right, but his figure for human emissions are 1000 times too low. Our emissions are 7 Gigatons, not 7 Megatons, and they're about about 100 times the emissions from volcanoes.

It's also incorrect that the rise of CO2 is constant. A few years ago it jumped to over 2 ppm per year and has stayed there. The reason is not known, but it suggests that positive feedbacks are beginning to kick in.

Well, almost any plants and animals have a very high ability of adaption for warmer climate, whereas there is much lower tolerance for colder regions. So most species will not have problems. In general warmer climate means more evaporation of water, thus higher humidity, less deserts, more CO2, now bound in the ocean waters,which helps plants for assimilation. In fact many plants suffer because of the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and many plants had to find new ways of assimilation to avoid extinction (C4-cycle, CAM-cycle).

It's complete nonsense that plants and animals have a high ability to adapt to higher temperatures. If that were the case you should find all the polar and temperate species living in the tropics as well, but you don't. Plants and animals are found in certain climatic zones that they are adapted to.

Given space and time, species can move. The problem is that it's happening too fast for many of them and the experts predict that a large proportion of species will be made extinct.

The difference in global temperature between the middle of an ice age and an interglacial like we're in now is 5-6C. It takes about 5000 years for that change to take place. That's a rate of 1C per thousand years.

In the last 30 years the average global temperature has increased by 0.6C. That's a rate of 1C per 50 years. It's 20 times faster. It's been shown that climatic zones are shifting polewards much faster than most species can move. The rate is expected to increase over the course of this century unless our emissions fall a great deal. The climate models predict that the Earth will warm by at least a few degrees over the century. We're talking about getting on for the difference between an ice age and an interglacial, not in 5000 years, but in 100. It's the sheer speed of the change that's the big problem.

Argos

03-06-2007, 19:03

Got to love the global warming deniers graphs! Notice that the graph ends just after 1980. Why is that? Because the relationship between length of solar cycle and temperature broke down then.
Congratulations! You are the first to call the authors deniers. Nobody denies global warming. They made their study for the time between 1850 to 2000 (the time of publication was 2001) and because they used averaging techniques for the graph, they skipped the first and last ten years to avoid unreal artefacts. I don't know what you have to complain there.

Argos' figures for emissions from volcanic activity are about right, but his figure for human emissions are 1000 times too low. Our emissions are 7 Gigatons, not 7 Megatons, and they're about about 100 times the emissions from volcanoes.
You're right, big mistake, obviously I got lost during converting units. Thanks for clearing *embarrassed*

It's also incorrect that the rise of CO2 is constant. A few years ago it jumped to over 2 ppm per year and has stayed there. The reason is not known, but it suggests that positive feedbacks are beginning to kick in.
Well, I oversimplified a bit. The average of the last 50 years would be 1.5 ppm - in reality the slope of the accumulation increases constantly, but this can be seen since the last 'little ice-age' at the end of the 16th century. Whatever is the reason, it has to be in the past, not the present.

It's complete nonsense that plants and animals have a high ability to adapt to higher temperatures. If that were the case you should find all the polar and temperate species living in the tropics as well, but you don't.
The colonization of Australia is a good example, that adaption from species of cool temperate climate to a much hotter climate is not a big problem. You can easily plant most of your plants at home in UK into a tropical country without serious trouble, whereas to transplant in arctical regions it's often very difficult, if not impossible. The main adaption problem is competition, which is dramatically increased in tropical regions, not so much the climate.

The difference in global temperature between the middle of an ice age and an interglacial like we're in now is 5-6C. It takes about 5000 years for that change to take place. That's a rate of 1C per thousand years.

In the last 30 years the average global temperature has increased by 0.6C. That's a rate of 1C per 50 years. It's 20 times faster. It's been shown that climatic zones are shifting polewards much faster than most species can move. The rate is expected to increase over the course of this century unless our emissions fall a great deal. The climate models predict that the Earth will warm by at least a few degrees over the century. We're talking about getting on for the difference between an ice age and an interglacial, not in 5000 years, but in 100. It's the sheer speed of the change that's the big problem.
As for the speed of temperature increase, here is a quote from the NCDC on abrupt climatic changes in the past:
...the climate system has changed in the past in ways that are much larger and faster than anything we have observed in the last few centuries or estimated over the past 10,000 years. Most of these changes involve major rearrangements of the ocean-atmosphere-land-ice system.

During a brief period called the Younger Dryas, after temperatures in most of the Northern
Hemisphere had begun to warm from the last ice age, they rapidly returned to near-glacial
conditions. After about 1,000 years, they abruptly warmed again, with temperatures in Greenland warming by eight degrees Celsius (+14°F) in a decade. By comparison, the change in the global mean annual temperature over the last 140 years has been less than 1°C...
For reference (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/final.html)

We can't blame everything on industrial revolution and exploitation of natural ressources. Things we see now, have happened numerous times before. The predictions of climate models are based on small data sets with significant lack of data for the oceans (currents, salinity, acidity, vertical distribution of their values and influence of it's biomass), the formation and energy balance of clouds (serious research begun only recently) and turbulances in the atmosphere are studied not well enough to come to firm conclusions about the future. At least nice mathematical playing around!

Talyubittu

03-06-2007, 19:09

Just jumping into this as an outsider...but...

Doesn't a volcanic eruption put an excess of carbon into the atmosphere alone? I seriously doubt that the planet - that has been here much longer than any of us, is going to just randomly stop working. This thing has been alive for years, and has dealt with more than any of us have ever immagined, I don't think that we need to get panicked about "OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", but I certainly do think that the world does need to re-adjust their scopes when it comes to taking care of our little blue planet.

Larie't

03-06-2007, 20:31

Doesn't a volcanic eruption put an excess of carbon into the atmosphere alone?.

Yes. But the amount of carbon that comes out of a normal size volcano isn't that much. But supervolcano eruptions have caused major changes in climate and are attach to many climate changes in the past..

..about "An Inconvenient Truth", that was a really good movie. He should have been president instead. *sighs*

Yey for Al!

simon

03-06-2007, 22:30

Congratulations! You are the first to call the authors deniers. Nobody denies global warming. They made their study for the time between 1850 to 2000 (the time of publication was 2001) and because they used averaging techniques for the graph, they skipped the first and last ten years to avoid unreal artefacts. I don't know what you have to complain there.

It wasn't to avoid 'unreal artefacts', but because the pattern they were claiming can't be seen after 1980. The pattern of warming after 1980 is what needs to be explained. It's acknowledged that solar activity has had an influence on temperatures in the past and that was the traditional explanation for most temperature changes. But solar activity can't explain the pattern of warming since 1980 and so can't explain the 0.6C warming we've seen in the last 30 years, which is the main evidence that global warming is happening.

After I caught you making such an elementary error, I'm surprised you still have the nerve to claim that you know more about this than me. Nobody who is at all familiar with the issue or scientific units would claim that human carbon dioxide emissions are only 1/1000th of what they really are and use that to claim that CO2 emissions from volcanoes are greater. It reveals that you're just a big mouth with no real knowledge of this subject.

Well, I oversimplified a bit. The average of the last 50 years would be 1.5 ppm - in reality the slope of the accumulation increases constantly, but this can be seen since the last 'little ice-age' at the end of the 16th century. Whatever is the reason, it has to be in the past, not the present.

The ice-core record shows that the atmospheric CO2 concentration was fairly constant around 280ppm until about 1800, since which it has increased increasingly rapidly.

Here (http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/globalwarmA3.html) are some graphs of what has happened over recent centuries.

And here (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/) are graphs and commentary about the last 650,000 years. The CO2 concentration was always between 180ppm (in the depths of the coldest ice ages) and 300ppm (in the warmest interglacials). Since 1800, though, the concentration has increased from 280ppm (which had been pretty stable for the last 10,000 years of this interglacial) to 380ppm in 2006.

The increase can be tied to the Industrial Revolution because that's when it started, it has been accelerating as human carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing and because the isotopic ratio shows that most of the additional carbon came from fossil sources, rather than somewhere in the biosphere.

The colonization of Australia is a good example, that adaption from species of cool temperate climate to a much hotter climate is not a big problem. You can easily plant most of your plants at home in UK into a tropical country without serious trouble, whereas to transplant in arctical regions it's often very difficult, if not impossible. The main adaption problem is competition, which is dramatically increased in tropical regions, not so much the climate.

Rabbits and sheep aren't an ecosystem. Some temperate species can make the transition, but a lot can't. Your view certainly isn't shared by the experts. This paper (http://www.nature.com/nature/links/040108/040108-1.html) from the journal Nature estimates that 15-37% of a representative sample of species are at risk of extinction from expected global warming by 2050.

As for the speed of temperature increase, here is a quote from the NCDC on abrupt climatic changes in the past:

For reference (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/final.html)

"During a brief period called the Younger Dryas, after temperatures in most of the Northern
Hemisphere had begun to warm from the last ice age, they rapidly returned to near-glacial
conditions. After about 1,000 years, they abruptly warmed again, with temperatures in Greenland warming by eight degrees Celsius (+14°F) in a decade. By comparison, the change in the global mean annual temperature over the last 140 years has been less than 1°C..."

That's describing a change in Greenland. The Younger Dryas event most affected the North Atlantic region and was centred on Greenland. What's more, changes in temperatures near the poles tend to be much greater than the global average - that's why we get ice ages with relatively small changes in global average temperatures. For example, Alaska has warmed by 6C in the last 30 years while the global average increase has been 0.6C. An additional 1.3C increase in global temperatures will probably trigger the complete and irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

Even so, the start of the Younger Dryas was rather unpleasant. At exactly the same time most of the large animals in North America went extinct and the human hunter-gatherers who lived there (the Clovis people) were wiped out.

We can't blame everything on industrial revolution and exploitation of natural ressources.

We can, because the isotopic ratio shows that the additional CO2 in the atmosphere since 1800 is overwhelmingly from the burning of fossil fuels.

Things we see now, have happened numerous times before.

There has been nothing like such a rapid and large change in CO2 concentrations in the 650,000 years of the ice-core record.

The predictions of climate models are based on small data sets with significant lack of data for the oceans (currents, salinity, acidity, vertical distribution of their values and influence of it's biomass), the formation and energy balance of clouds (serious research begun only recently) and turbulances in the atmosphere are studied not well enough to come to firm conclusions about the future. At least nice mathematical playing around!

Don't believe what you read on propaganda websites that tell you that volcanic carbon emissions are greater than human emissions. The models do deal with oceans and clouds. There is an enormous mass of scientific evidence which has convinced nearly all the world's scientists. That's why they're raising the alarm.

forre

03-06-2007, 22:39

Climate change is irrelevant indeed. The humanity survived ice age, so it will survive the dry age too. Then, the Earth isn't center of the Universe, so sooner or later it's going to dissapear. If to speak using the Universal measurment, 1000 years of the acceleration towards the planet collaps mean nothing. Though, it's good that people try to take care. :)

Amy_Lee_Rocks

03-06-2007, 22:42

Climate change is irrelevant indeed. The humanity survived ice age, so it will survive the dry age too. Then, the Earth isn't center of the Universe, so sooner or later it's going to dissapear. If to speak using the Universal measurment, 1000 years of the acceleration towards the planet collaps mean nothing. Though, it's good that people try to take care. :)

:none: Thats a pretty scary thing.

forre

03-06-2007, 22:59

Thats a pretty scary thing
No it isn't. Our problem is that we think we are invincible and immortal. None of this material world is immortal. Find your own ways of thinking and you'll be happy because that's the only thing we want.

Talyubittu

04-06-2007, 06:07

No it isn't. Our problem is that we think we are invincible and immortal. None of this material world is immortal. Find your own ways of thinking and you'll be happy because that's the only thing we want.

I don't think I am invincible or immortal...but I still don't want to die, or have my life/other species be threatened.

No offense forre, but if thats your honest outlook on this situation, I'm going to provide you with a number to a mental health facility in your area.

As far as this adaptation thing however...the only problem I see is mainly with sea animals. Animals that are contained at zoo's are maintained in fake atmospheres, and some of them are in entirely differen't ones, tropical birds for example. I have a tropical bird, but she hates heat. She's always trying to sneak out of her cage and crawl into the vent in my room. I swear one day I'm going to wake up and find birdie feathers all over the house becuase she got caught in it :-/ EEEP! :( My baby!

PowerPuff Grrl

04-06-2007, 07:05

How would sea creatures be effected?
Are there any that depend specifically on cold waters to survive? I mean, I'm pretty sure they'll survive if the water is a tad warmer, only problem I see are changes in the ocean current that may seriously fuck em' up to extinction. Other than that if the ocean current stays constant; ice melts, ocean grows bigger, more room to swim.

I think it's mainly the eco-systems located on-land in extreme weathers that will seriously be affected like the life that lives in the Arctic tundra, what with the polar bears drowning cause the ice caps are melting and the fragile eco-systems in the deserts relying on rain that falls few and far in between. That rain stops too quickly and all that lives in the Kalahari desert dies. So on and so forth.

What really gets to me though is that some seriously fucked-up conservative "think tanks" have actually realized profit potential in this whole thing. While the Southern Hemisphere may become uninhabitable and the coasts may go under water, present uninhabitable areas inland; like East Russia, Northern Canada and Greenland, will warm up and become land prospects to welcome new settlers. (And you just know this will not be given away to the people who had nothing to do with this).

You know I was always concerned for Global Warming but never as much as I am now. Before last winter I seriously thought that it wasn't a pressing issue, like I knew the climate would change but not in my lifetime, nor my children's (if any), but perhaps in a hundred years or so. I thought that movie Day After Tomorrow, where the one half of world is completely frozen over in just a couple of days due to Climate Change, was the biggest practise of suspending disbelief one could ever hope for in a film. But just this past winter, snow didn't fall in Canada until late January!!!
We had a green fucking Christmas.
Canada.
No snow.
Lord have mercy, we are all going die!

forre

04-06-2007, 10:15

I don't think I am invincible or immortal...but I still don't want to die, or have my life/other species be threatened.

No offense forre, but if thats your honest outlook on this situation, I'm going to provide you with a number to a mental health facility in your area.
What I'm saying is that a global warming shouldn't be causing a global panic. We are trying to take care of our wastes, they research on the causes of this warming. It's not like we are sitting and doing nothing.

Talyubittu, I personally think that you should learn how to communicate without offending another people. Next time you'll get a warning.

freddie

04-06-2007, 16:07

Climate change is irrelevant indeed. The humanity survived ice age, so it will survive the dry age too. Then, the Earth isn't center of the Universe, so sooner or later it's going to dissapear. If to speak using the Universal measurment, 1000 years of the acceleration towards the planet collaps mean nothing. Though, it's good that people try to take care. :)

Yeah but see... the inevitable end (the Sun running out of hydrogen) is coming in approx. 8000000000 years, which as far as we're concerned is pretty much eternity. If there'll indeed be our ancestors still present at that time they're almost certainly bound to reach for the stars anyway.
What we have here is a much more pressing issue. As you pointed out in cosmic time where 1 million years means nothing, our 100 years is literaly a nano-second in the life of the cosmos, but a very important event in the life of our planet. Okay not the planet per se - (cause I'm sure the Earth will survive no matter what we do to it) - bur rather the planet as we know it - self-regulated, green, lush and hospitable to up to 10 billion humans.

Amy_Lee_Rocks

04-06-2007, 16:16

No it isn't. Our problem is that we think we are invincible and immortal. None of this material world is immortal. Find your own ways of thinking and you'll be happy because that's the only thing we want.

I dont think I am invincible or immortal.
I know we're all gonna die someday, sooner or later.
I just think its scary cause you never know what might happen next.

forre

04-06-2007, 20:52

I just think its scary cause you never know what might happen next.
Don't be scared. Live your life instead because we do not know what will happen next. We plan a bit here and there but there's no guarantee that our plans will hold.

freddie, You got it right, the only problem is that we still don't know for sure what causes this global warming. Some scientists say it's the pollution and some say it isn't.

Talyubittu

04-06-2007, 22:50

Talyubittu, I personally think that you should learn how to communicate without offending another people. Next time you'll get a warning.

I said no offense. It was sarcasm.

Because your opinion on dieing and this dramatic change isn't the same as many of ours. A lot of us don't like having unexpected things that will change our way of life happening. Just becuase it doesn't bother you, doesn't mean it shouldn't anyone else. Because honestly, a new climate means a lot of change. And that does scare me. I don't like the unknown.

forre

04-06-2007, 23:03

Talyubittu, The sarcasm used isn't precisely brilliant. Such things should be used with care.

I actually like it when it gets warmer. Less cold winters.

Amanda

04-06-2007, 23:12

I actually like it when it gets warmer. Less cold winters.I'm the opposite. Most likely because we have really hot summers, it's already 80°F. :none:

Amy_Lee_Rocks

04-06-2007, 23:20

Don't be scared. Live your life instead because we do not know what will happen next. We plan a bit here and there but there's no guarantee that our plans will hold.

Thats true, especially for me..but oh well, i guess thats how it will be untill I die.
Being 17 and trying to live life..right now is pretty hard..I honestly dont know what i want
or where to go...but thats besides the point.

I'm the opposite. Most likely because we have really hot summers, it's already 80°F. :none:

OMG!, I feel the same way!
It gets really hot and humid here in Texas...You cant even walk arround
the park between 12-5 without being badly burned...or feeling sick..fainty
and just sweaty!
I love the winters! They dont last long..so i sit outside when its super cold.

Talyubittu

04-06-2007, 23:27

Talyubittu, The sarcasm used isn't precisely brilliant. Such things should be used with care.

I actually like it when it gets warmer. Less cold winters.

I'm more of a cool person. I like being warm...but it begins to bother me. Thats why I like my location, it balences. Freezing winters, but the winds make the summers extremely hot. Hotter than the south gets sometimes.

simon

05-06-2007, 00:42

How would sea creatures be effected?
Are there any that depend specifically on cold waters to survive? I mean, I'm pretty sure they'll survive if the water is a tad warmer, only problem I see are changes in the ocean current that may seriously fuck em' up to extinction. Other than that if the ocean current stays constant; ice melts, ocean grows bigger, more room to swim.

Many sea creatures are adapted to a particular temperature range, but in general it is easier for most of them to migrate than it is for land animals.

It's going to be difficult for sea creatures that live in the Arctic or Antarctic because there are no colder waters for them to move to.

The most vulnerable ecosystem of all is coral reefs. Corals 'bleach' when they are under stress and often die as a consequence. High temperatures are one of the causes and the 1998 El Nino led to massive coral bleaching around the world. Climate models indicate that such temperatures will occur almost every year in a few decades' time. Scientists think the future for coral reefs is very bleak. Reference (http://chge.med.harvard.edu/education/course_2007/topics/02_28/documents/knowlton.pdf)

I think it's mainly the eco-systems located on-land in extreme weathers that will seriously be affected like the life that lives in the Arctic tundra, what with the polar bears drowning cause the ice caps are melting and the fragile eco-systems in the deserts relying on rain that falls few and far in between. That rain stops too quickly and all that lives in the Kalahari desert dies. So on and so forth.

The polar regions are particularly vulnerable because the temperature changes tend to be much more there and there is nowhere colder to migrate to. Climate change has complicated effects because as well as warming it changes the pattern of rainfall. Some regions tend to become wetter and others dryer. In general, regions that are wet tend to become wetter and regions that are dry tend to become dryer, but that's not always the case. Climate change is already drying out the Amazon and some models predict that later this century the Amazon will dry out so much that what remains will burn and the area will turn to grassy scrub.

This is what the summary of the 2007 IPCC report (http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM13apr07.pdf) for the United Nations by the world's leading experts says:

The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g., flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification), and other global change drivers (e.g., land use change, pollution, over-exploitation of resources).

Over the course of this century, net carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems is likely to peak before mid-century and then weaken or even reverse, thus amplifying climate change. Approximately 20-30% of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5oC. For increases in global average temperature exceeding 1.5-2.5°C and in concomitant atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and function, species’ ecological interactions, and species’ geographic ranges, with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity, and ecosystem goods and services e.g., water and food supply.

(I know Argos thinks the experts are all wrong, but he also thought that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than our burning of fossil fuels, so you can't take his claims seriously.)

You know I was always concerned for Global Warming but never as much as I am now. Before last winter I seriously thought that it wasn't a pressing issue, like I knew the climate would change but not in my lifetime, nor my children's (if any), but perhaps in a hundred years or so. I thought that movie Day After Tomorrow, where the one half of world is completely frozen over in just a couple of days due to Climate Change, was the biggest practise of suspending disbelief one could ever hope for in a film. But just this past winter, snow didn't fall in Canada until late January!!!
We had a green fucking Christmas.
Canada.
No snow.
Lord have mercy, we are all going die!

The Day After Tomorrow was an extreme exaggeration of the possible sudden shutdown of the thermohaline circulation (popularly referred to as the Gulf Stream), which is what happened over a few years (rather than a couple of days) at the beginning of the Younger Dryas when a large ice lake on the eastern coast of Labrador suddenly melted and poured into the sea, dramatically cooling the strait between Labrador and Greenland. It's been suggested that the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet could have the same effect. It's unlikely that the collapse would be sudden enough to do that, though.

Climate change isn't going to happen in the extremely sudden way it happened in the movie. It is happening faster than was expected, but it's going to take several decades to play out. One of the problems in getting people to take it seriously is that there's a lag of decades between carbon dioxide emissions and the full effect being felt. We're currently experience the warming effect of emissions up to about the 1960s. If we stopped adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere tomorrow, the Earth would continue to warm, although more slowly, for a few decades more. What's going to happen is that the warming will accelerate. We don't know how quickly it will accelerate because it depends on our future emissions path and how quickly the terrestrial carbon sinks such as forests, soils and permafrost turn into carbon sources themselves due to warming.

We don't know whether emissions will be brought down quickly enough to avoid crossing very dangerous thresholds. The Earth has already warmed by ~0.75C above pre-industrial levels and climate scientists say that anything above 2C is crossing a dangerous threshold that could easily spiral out of control - that's why it's the EU target to avoid warming above 2C. To have a 50% chance of that would require global emissions to stop rising by 2015 and fall by half (80% in developed countries) by 2050, which is what the EU countries are proposing at the G8 summit. It's very unlikely that the other countries will agree to that. The higher the temperature rise, the more likely we will cross the threshold that makes the warming spiral out of control. But even if we continue on our present emissions path we will probably have a few decades until we pass the 2C point. The trigger may not be at 2C, it may be higher. We'll have to live our lives like Madame de Pompadour, who apparently had a premonition of the French Revolution and declared Après nous le déluge! We've got to do something to stop that happening and not adopt forre's defeatist fatalism, which I diagnose as a kind of psychological denial mechanism to avoid confronting the awfulness of what is likely to happen unless the human race decides to make a dramatic change of course. But we don't need to panic or get hopelessly depressed just yet. There's plenty of time for that later.

11Russia

05-06-2007, 00:56

I don't know if it won't happen fast as the movie but the true is that is happening.
In my area we didn't had tornados never, but the past three months have been so rainy which I like it because this area is so hot, but a tornado hit the city in April it was so horrible...
And we never had such thing like that before... :S

simon

05-06-2007, 01:40

freddie, You got it right, the only problem is that we still don't know for sure what causes this global warming. Some scientists say it's the pollution and some say it isn't.

Who says climate change is due to greenhouse gas emissions:

The science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Carribean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

A large number of professional scientific associations around the world have adopted statements attributing climate change to human activities.

In the United States alone: American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Astronomical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Geological Society of America, American Association of State Climatologists, American Chemical Society, American Quaternary Association

Who says it isn't:

The only professional scientific organisation that rejects the finding of significant human influence on recent climate is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. In May 2007 they announced they are revising their policy as many of their members disagree with it.

A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html) detailed how Exxon Mobil has funded organisations and scientists that deny the evidence that climate change is due to greenhouse gas emissions. They actually took over a network of organisations and scientists that had been set up by the tobacco industry to deny that smoking causes cancer.

Most of the scientists who publicly deny the evidence are paid by those organisations or similar organisations funded by other oil and coal interests. It's all documented (http://exxonsecrets.org/).

Talyubittu

05-06-2007, 02:26

Our weather here was akward. We didn't have snow until even after Christmas, in January. And then it was rain, and show, and even last year I think it was, we still had snow coming down in April.

forre

05-06-2007, 09:02

A large number of professional scientific associations around the world have adopted statements attributing climate change to human activities.
They do but it's not sufficient to force USA and Australia to sign as little as Kyoto Protocol and it's not enough to start manufacturing less gas consuming engines. The technology exists but we still pump like 10 gallons of gas in our cars instead of 1. That's why I care so little about all talks over how dangerous it is because the oil mob is controlling more than we think.

freddie

05-06-2007, 13:05

Most of the scientists who publicly deny the evidence are paid by those organisations or similar organisations funded by other oil and coal interests. It's all documented (http://exxonsecrets.org/).

Here's a thought though: it just might be that these organizations are sponsored by oil companies BECAUSE they're sceptics, rather then pressuming they've only become skeptics after recieving funds.

I still maintain my stance that corporate profit will never back down to a greater cause like saving the environment. That's the basic rule of capitalism. It's not just the oil companies. The whole industrial machine works that way. Environmentalists are too idealistic regarding the issue. Fact is we're living in the real world, where financial gain is the only thing that matters and if you're going to make huge coroprate entities (which more than likely sponsor political elites) to give in to environmental concern is to convince them they'll profit financially in the long run. Shell is a good example of this, investing huge summs of money into renewable energy research. Why? Not because they're so greatly concerned about our habitat or because they're altruistically trying to insure the persistant existence of mankind on this planet, but rather because they're counting they'll make big profit of it in the long run (if they catch their fellow petrochemical-selling peers off guard).

Plus I don't think the internal combustion engines are our biggest concerns right now. At least not since the almighty catalytic converter came along. There's much more carbon monoxide being produced by cows than cars these days.

simon

05-06-2007, 19:07

Plus I don't think the internal combustion engines are our biggest concerns right now. At least not since the almighty catalytic converter came along. There's much more carbon monoxide being produced by cows than cars these days.

The main problem now is carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide. Cars with catalytic converters are actually slightly less efficient and produce a bit more carbon dioxide. Cows don't produce any carbon monoxide. It's highly toxic for them, like us.

Amy_Lee_Rocks

05-06-2007, 20:36

The main problem now is carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide. Cars with catalytic converters are actually slightly less efficient and produce a bit more carbon dioxide. Cows don't produce any carbon monoxide. It's highly toxic for them, like us.
[/OFF]

cows lol

forre

06-06-2007, 01:10

Cows, cars, LOL. So where are we? Anyone has a solution or at least a suggestion on what can be done or we are here to scare each other and to complain about the climate change?

freddie

06-06-2007, 08:34

Cows, cars, LOL. So where are we? Anyone has a solution or at least a suggestion on what can be done or we are here to scare each other and to complain about the climate change?

Like I said tempt huge multinational conglomerates, (who indirectly run world politics) with possible profit they could make from saving the environment. The language of money. That's the only one they understand well.